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Peter Holmberg wrote: The birth of an industry
Roberta WilliamsKen WilliamsThe fantastic history of Sierra Entertainment started back in 1979 in the home of Ken and Roberta Williams, an ordinary couple in their mid-20:s, living in Simi Valley, Los Angeles with their two young sons D.J. and Chris.
At the time, Ken was working as a contract programmer for IBM, developing an income tax program on a mainframe computer 3,000 miles away from L.A. One night he found a program labeled "Adventure" on the mainframe. Curious of what it could be, he downloaded it and it turned out to be a copy of Colossal Caves, the legendary text adventure game created by William Crowther in 1972 and expanded by Don Woods in 1976. Back in the days of the ARPAnet (the early Internet), this game was very famous. It was the first true "interactive fiction" computer game. Ken (as so many other people who saw the game) was very fascinated with it.

Roberta wasn't very interested in computers at the time, but Ken showed her the game on a terminal he had brought home from work. Roberta, who had been a big fairy-tale and adventure fiction lover ever since her childhood, was instantly hooked in this new breed of storytelling and played her way through Colossal Cave with great enthusiasm.

The Apple IIFor Christmas 1979, Ken bought a $2,000 Apple II microcomputer with a whooping (for its day) 64k of memory, an 85k floppy disk drive and a monochrome monitor. He was planning to use it to develop a FORTRAN compiler for Apple computers. At the time, he could never have imagined in what a dramatic way this purchase would affect his future, and indeed the future of computer gaming itself!

At the time, a company called Adventure International developed text adventure games for the Apple II. Roberta played their games, but even though she liked them, she wasn't entirely content with the adventure games that existed at the time. She realized that this medium had the possibilities to do even more than presenting text descriptions on the screen. Modern computers could display graphics! So, instead of telling the player ”You are standing in front of a house”, why not just display a picture of the house on the screen instead? The games could use better plots too, making them even more interesting to play. A wild idea started to form in her mind...

Roberta sat down in front of the kitchen table and started to write down her ideas. Three weeks later she presented to Ken the script of a computer game called Mystery House, an idea she had developed during the previous days, in between watching the kids (D.J. was seven at the time and Chris was only one year old) and doing other everyday household stuff. The game would revolve around a murder mystery, where you as the player would be trapped overnight in an old house together with seven other people, one of whom would be a killer. But who? The house would also contain a hidden treasure that the player had to find. (Inspiration was taken from the famous Agatha Christie story Ten Little Indians and the parlor game Clue.) At first, Ken wasn't very excited about her idea, but eventually Roberta caught his attention, especially when she said she wanted the game to contain pictures instead of just text.

Roberta managed to talk Ken into helping her develop the game in the evenings after work. Ken figured out a way to fit the amount of graphics she wanted into the very limited memory of their Apple II computer and created the tools needed to draw it, as there still were no drawing programs available on the market. They bought a crude graphics drawing tablet with a mechanic arm that, with lots of hard work, could transfer a drawing on a piece of paper to a computer image. Ken also programmed the logic code needed in the game. Roberta worked on the text and the graphics and told Ken how to put it all together to make it the game she wanted. She did the quality assurance of the game herself. They worked on it for about three months and in May 5 1980, Mystery House was finally ready for shipment! They placed a small ad in Micro Magazine, made copies of the game themselves and packaged them in small square folders, sealed inside ziplock bags. The boxart was designed by Roberta's mother Nova, who was a good oil painter. The games were then distributed to the only four (!) software stores available in Los Angeles county at the time by Ken and Roberta personally. It cost $24.95 and was distributed under Ken's company name On-Line systems.

On-Line systems logo

Roberta in front of her Apple IIWith their first computer game done, Ken and Roberta started to make plans for the future. They thought that if they could just write games popular enough to earn them about $40,000 a year, they could move out of Los Angeles in a few years and live in a ”log cabin in the woods”, working together at home, making computer games and raising their children in a peaceful and beautiful environment close to nature instead of the big and busy city of L.A. They had no idea that this humble dream would be a heavy understatement to what was actually going to happen to them in the following years.

The Mystery HouseWho is the killer?

A change of lifestyle
Mystery House was an instant hit. The graphics, although consisting only of crude line drawings, monochrome and motionless, was something previously unseen in an adventure game and people loved it! The orders were pouring in and so was the money. By August 1980, Mystery House had already sold enough copies to enable Ken and Roberta to move out of L.A. They bought a house in Coarsegold, a small gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada foothills just south of Yosemite National Park, where Roberta's parents John and Nova owned an apple orchard.
Mystery House is usually regarded as the first computer game ever to have graphics, and as such is considered a classic game and a landmark achievement in computer gaming history. It sold about 15,000 copies and earned $167,000, an unprecedented number for the time. Ken and Roberta who had not anticipated this huge popularity of the game would constantly get telephone calls day and night by people who wanted to buy the game. They realized that suddenly, 30-40,000 people had become aware of their home phone number! After about 6 months they moved to the small mountain town of Oakhurst, seven miles north of Coarsegold. Chaos lasted for about three more months in their new home until Ken and Roberta finally hired an office, located on top of a print shop, to take care of the business from. Their very first employee was John Williams, Ken's brother, and the early On-Line systems staff consisted mostly of friends and relatives of Ken and Roberta. But the company was growing quickly...

Ken and Roberta's second adventure game was Wizard and the Princess, a game with a story based on the many fairy-tales Roberta used to read as a child. This game was an improvement from Mystery House mainly because it had color graphics. It's possible that it was the first computer game ever to have color graphics (at least it was surely the first adventure game with color) and it sold over 60,000 copies, truly an impressive number for the early 80’s! The Apple II could only display six different colors simultaneously, but clever use of pixel patterns, (a technique called dithering), made it possible to give the illusion of more colors on the screen.

Wizard and the Princess was also released for the Atari 8-bit, the Commodore 64 and, in 1982, for the IBM PC, then under the name Adventures in Serenia.

Wizard and the Princess

Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess were the first two in a series of about ten games, called the Hi-res Adventures, released between 1980 and 1982. Roberta and Ken were very involved in the design of most of them.

Time Zone boxartIn 1981, Roberta broke the barriers of adventure gaming again with the release of Time Zone, a game that was so big it spanned six double-sided disks, far more than any previous computer game. It was the biggest computer game ever made for about seven years. While the average adventure game of the time usually had about 90 "rooms", Time Zone had about 1400! This was also the first On-Line systems game with graphics drawn by professional artists, and it took a full year to make. The game even earned special recognition by the Smithsonian Institution. It was first sold for $99.95, but that was much too expensive for most consumers so the game didn't sell very well in the beginning and the price had to be lowered.

Sometime around this period, On-Line systems changed their name to Sierra On-Line, relating to their location in the Sierra Nevada area. They also adopted the shape of Half Dome, one of Yosemite's most spectacular and famous landmarks, in their logotype.

Half DomeFirst Sierra On-Line logo

Mystery House boxartRoberta also wrote The Dark Crystal in 1982, a game based on Muppets creator Jim Henson's animated movie with the same name. It was released under a new logo: SierraVenture. Some of the earlier games, including Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess were also re-released under this new logo, packaged in more proffesional-looking boxes. The Dark Crystal was later released in a simplified version intended for younger players as The Gelfling Adventure. This game was the first one made by Al Lowe, who a couple of years later would become one of Sierra On-Line's most famous game designers. The Dark Crystal was the first computer game to be based on a movie.

Alongside with Sierra On-Line, computer game company Infocom developed pure text adventure games. Without the graphics they could utilize computer memory to develop much better text parsers than Sierra On-Line, enabling the player to write long and complicated sentences in the games. Sierra On-Line could not compete with Infocom in this field, but they didn't really need to as they still sold a lot of games.

Next to the adventure games, Ken and Roberta's company also released a number of very successful arcade games on license, such as Frogger and Jawbreaker. These games were labeled SierraVision for some time. It's all a bit confusing, but so was the computer industry as a whole during these years. They even released a few non-entertainment software products, such as the HomeWord Speller word processor. Ken was working hard during this initial period of the company to gain understanding of the digital entertainment industry so he could lead the company in the right direction. His opinion of computer games had changed dramatically in these few years. Hundreds of letters from all over the country, though many of them unfortunately lost when the Williams' Coarsegold house burnt to the ground in 1982, told Ken and Roberta that the games they were making were important to people. Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, obviously a real hero in Ken's eyes, sent them a letter and told them what a delight it was to see their games run on the Apple II. This was an important encouragement to Ken, as he had to face an uncertain future for the company...

Part 2 - The Golden Days (1984-1988)
In the early 80’s, a large number of companies fought to become the leaders in the new and very attractive market of home computing. Venture capitalists had seized some control of Sierra On-Line after borrowing them money for the development of their early games. They wanted the company to turn their attention towards cartridge-based computers, and invested lots of venture capital on the development of software for systems such as the Atari VCS, Coleco Adam and Vic-20. Recognize any of these names? No, probably not; they were all instant flops, and in mid-1984, Sierra On-Line was put on the brink of extinction because of these poor investments. Stuck with piles of cartridges for millions of dollars that no one wanted to buy, the history of Sierra On-Line could have ended right here. It nearly vanished together with the many other companies who fell under the collapsing home computer market at the time, and would probably not have been remembered today.
IBM comes to the rescue and King’s Quest is born
The IBM PCjrFortunately for Sierra On-Line, about a year before this disaster they had been contacted by IBM and been given an offer that was simply impossible to reject. The guys at Big Blue announced that they had begun development of a microcomputer that they thought would take the computer market by storm: The IBM PCjr! It was going to be a much cheaper alternative to the business-directed IBM PC and entirely designed for the home market. Besides the usual 5.25'' 320k disk drive it would have two cartridge ports, making it easy for children to load and run games on it. It was also going to have 16-color graphic capabilities, three-channel sound and 128k of memory, much better than the IBM PC. A special, wireless keyboard with rubber "chicklet" keys was also designed for the PCjr.
But to showcase the features of this new computer to the public they needed a game that would take use of its impressive features, and they wanted Sierra On-Line to make that game. IBM would fund the entire development of the game, pay royalties for it and even advertise for the game on TV! But they wanted in return a game that was not only good; it had to be ground-breaking!

Of course this was a great opportunity, but also a big risk for Sierra On-Line. They could simply not afford to fail. The challenge was irresistible for Ken and Roberta, who accepted and started right away on the project. Still, it was a pretty controversial project. Sierra On-Line had been faithful to the Apple right from the beginning, and now they were working on a computer game for IBM! The venture capitalists who helped funding the early Sierra On-Line didn't believe in the project at all, but that didn't stop Roberta!

In the spirit of Wizard and the Princess, Roberta came up with a story based on classic fairy-tale elements where a knight would have to save a kingdom in distress by recovering three lost treasures. Her game concept included animated color graphics, a pseudo 3D-perspective where you could see the main character on the screen and be able to control his movements with the arrow keys on the keyboard, a much more competent text parser that would understand advanced commands from the player and music playing in the background through the PCjr sound hardware. Your character should be able to move in front of or between objects on the screen, his graphics covering or being covered by these objects accordingly. It was going to look and feel just like an animated cartoon that the player could control himself! Something as advanced as this had never been made before and some people simply didn’t believe it was possible to turn Roberta's concept into a real game. But Roberta was as determined as usual and didn't let go of her requirements.

In order to bring together all of the graphics, text and logic code for Roberta’s new game, Sierra On-Line needed brand new programming tools. A complete adventure game development system, called AGI (short for Adventure Game Interpreter) was developed. All of the text, graphics, sound and game logic would be designed to run in this interpreter. It would be easy to write other games for the same interpreter in the same way, and if Sierra On-Line wanted to port AGI games to other systems, they only needed an AGI interpreter for the new system that would run the games. Little or no changes to the game data itself was needed. (Basically the same idea as HTML code, being viewable with different browsers on different systems looking almost the same everywhere.)

King's Quest boxart, original PCjr versionIn the summer of 1984, only a short time after the big cartridge market crash, King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown, the first game developed for the PCjr was released, and people were amazed! This game was simply outstanding for its day. Sierra On-Line had succeeded and IBM got the kind of game they wanted. King’s Quest was a big hit on the IBM PCjr (nicknamed "peanut") and helped keeping the company alive. Unfortunately, the PCjr itself was not well received. It was very incompatible with the standard IBM PC, and its ”chicklet” keyboard wasn't working very well and couldn't exactly be called user-friendly. The introduction of the PCjr was also overshadowed by the release of the Apple Macintosh at about the same time. The PCjr was doomed for failure, and it spelled a new disaster for Sierra On-Line.

But once again, a lucky coincidence saved the company, as the Tandy Corporation introduced the Tandy 1000 in 1985, just a few weeks after IBM finally stopped production of the PCjr. It was compatible with the PCjr (although not marketed as such because of its bad reputation), it was compatible with MS-DOS and it was a life-saver for Sierra On-Line since you could play King’s Quest on it. As lots of people started buying the Tandy 1000, that quickly became the leader of the home computer market, lots of people started buying King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown as well. In a dramatic way, Sierra On-Line once again started earning money and was soon back on track, ready to take on new challenges.

History in the writing
The second half of the 80’s was a time of great growth and success for Sierra On-Line. The company that started at Ken and Roberta’s kitchen table just a few years back was growing steadily, but still managed to mantain the atmosphere of a ”family business”. It was a very stimulating environment to work in, as completely new ground was being broken and virtually everything was possible. Word of the success spread rapidly all over the country, and people came from far away places to Oakhurst and started working for the company. Many of them shared Ken's and Roberta's dream of a life close to nature and started new lives in the small but quickly growing mountain town. The customer support division in these early years was extremely friendly and helpful, and the customer base was loyal and quickly growing.
The company changed their logo to the more well-known design that they used for many years to come.

Second Sierra On-Line logo

In May 1985, Sierra On-Line released King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, a highly anticipated sequel that was just as popular as its predecessor. It used the AGI system developed for King's Quest: Quest for the Crown and didn't bring much technical innovation to the series, but it was a bigger and better game in every other aspect. Just what the fans had asked for.

1985 was also the year when Sierra On-Line moved out of their rented offices to the Sierra Professional Building, a structure built specifically for the quickly growing company. The structure would eventually grow to a whole complex of buildings in the following ten years as the company expanded.

In 1986, Sierra On-Line teamed up with Disney and released three adventure games aimed at younger children, called Mickey’s Space Adventure, The Black Cauldron and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood.
The Black Cauldron

Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter boxartWhile working hard on finishing The Black Cauldron, programmers Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy discovered that they had a mutual sense of humor and began to plan for an adventure game of their own. It was going to take place in outer space and it would be filled with crazy humor and an incredibly nerdy main character called Roger Wilco, a space janitor who fell asleep at work and ended up having to save the galaxy from an alien race known as the Sariens. They knew that Ken Williams wasn’t very interested in space themes, so they put together four sample rooms for Roger to walk around in using the AGI system in their spare time before they actually showed their ideas to Ken. Their simple demonstration impressed him enough to allow them to start working on the full game. It was named Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter. The game, released in October 1986, was an instant success and would get many sequels in the following years. The series has earned cult status today with a big community of fans all over the world. The Space Quest series is full of warped humor and classic adventure game moments.

In the same month as Space Quest was released, Sierra On-Line and Roberta Williams also released King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human. It spanned five double-sided disks and was thus their second biggest game ever, beaten only by Time Zone in size. It was much bigger and much harder than the previous King’s Quest games.

This was also the year when Lucasfilm Games (now called LucasArts), a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., released their first adventure game: Maniac Mansion. It used an interpreter called SCUMM, similar in concept to AGI. They would later become the most serious competitor to Sierra On-Line in the adventure game genre. They didn't publish nearly as many adventure games as Sierra On-Line, but their games were always well done and most of them went on to become classics.

Thexder1986 was also the year when Ken Williams made his first business trip to Japan. His intentions with the trip was to set up methods of selling Sierra software there. He traveled there with the impression that he could teach the Japanese a thing or two about computer gaming and perhaps sell a few products to them. What he found there was a total surprise. The Japanese computer gaming industry was not at all behind the American. On the contrary, they were way ahead of them. Nintendo, a company few people in America had even heard about yet, had already sold their Famicom console to over 4 million Japanese homes, and games like Super Mario Brothers were well known in the whole country. The games themselves were outstanding for the day, with stereo soundtracks and incredible graphics. Ken soon realized that it was the Japanese that could teach him, not vice versa. The trip ended up with one game bought insted of several sold. It was the action game Thexder that had captured Ken's interest. Sierra aquired the rights to port and publish the game in the U.S. from Game Arts, the Japanese publisher.
Thexder was a phenomenal success when it reached the shelves just before Christmas 1986. It became Sierra's bestselling game in 1987 and cooperation with Japanese publishers continued throughout the late 80's.

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge LizardsIn 1987, another classic Sierra On-Line game series was born. Al Lowe, who had been working at Sierra On-Line for many years, most recently as lead programmer for King’s Quest III, was asked by Ken Williams to write a modern version of a game called Softporn Adventure written in 1981 by Chuck Benton. It was the only pure text adventure that the company had ever released.
Al brought home a copy of Softporn Adventure to check it out, and discovered that the whole game was heavily outdated. He scrapped the original game material almost totally and came up with a main character called Larry Laffer, a nerdy loser in his 40:s that lived together with his mom until just recently, when she finally threw him out of the house. With a receding hairline and a 70's leisure suit in white polyester, earning him the nickname Leisure Suit Larry, this anti-hero comes to the city of Lost Wages hoping to lose his virginity. Al, a very humorous guy, filled the game with funny answers for almost every single thing the player could think of writing. The game, directed specifically to a more adult audience than other Sierra On-Line adventure games, mixed with Al’s humor was a fresh and bold combination that proved to be a huge success. Ken Loved the result and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (now, how’s that for a title!) was released in 1987. The game was a great hit (although not instantly), and it even won the Software Publishers' Association's "Best Adventure Game" award of 1987. A long series of Leisure Suit Larry games would follow in the coming years and become the second best selling game series of Sierra On-Line, beaten only by the King’s Quest series. Interestingly, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was probably also the most pirated game of the late 80’s. Sierra On-Line actually claims to have sold more hint books, providing the solution to the game, than they sold copies of the game itself! Larry Laffer has become one of the most famous computer game characters of all time and the theme song to the games, written by Al Lowe himself, is so extremely catchy that practically no one that has ever played a Leisure Suit Larry game can forget it!

Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel boxartJim Walls1987 also saw the start of yet another successful Sierra On-Line adventure game series. Produced by Jim Walls, ex-Officer of the California Highway Patrol, Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel put players in the shoes of Sonny Bonds, a veteran police officer who had to track down and capture a very dangerous drug dealer known as the Death Angel. Jim had no previous experience in computer game development. He met Ken Williams during a leave from service after getting involved in a shootout. Ken asked him if he wanted to use his experiences as a police officer to write an adventure game for Sierra On-Line. He accepted, happy to do something else after his traumatic incident. The result was a great success. With an exciting story that unfolded to a dramatic ending and a gameplay that required proper use of real life police procedures, Police Quest brought yet another breath of fresh air to the adventure game genre. Sierra On-Line was really writing computer gaming history during this time! It has been told that Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel was even used to some extent in the training of actual California police officers!

Roberta, resisting the pressure from the company and the fans to make a King’s Quest IV right after King’s Quest III, decided this year to write an educational game aimed specifically at younger kids. The result, Mixed-up Mother Goose, received great acclaim from the industry.

Peter Holmberg wrote:
In 1988, Dave, Barry and DeeDee Murry designed an original adventure game called Manhunter: New York. Using location picures of famous city landmarks for realism, they set the story in a dark future where alien eyeballs had invaded the earth, turning humans into slaves. The player starts out safely as a spy for the aliens, but has the option to risk everything and turn against them when the time is ready.

The Murrys: Dave, Barry and DeeDee
Ken and Roberta1988 would be the last year when Sierra On-Line used only the AGI system in their adventure games. In order to keep up with the technological evolution of computers and computer games, they developed a brand new interpreter called SCI (Sierra's Creative Interpreter). Although still pretty similar to AGI in many ways, it had lots of improvements: First of all, the graphic capabilities was now improved, as standard 320x200 EGA graphics was introduced. It doubled the resolution of the old AGI system, enabling much more detailed graphics. The old vector graphic techniques for background pictures used to save disk/memory space in the AGI games was brought along to the new interpreter, but now offered some improvements as well. The AGI system used dithering of pixels to approximate the original 160x200 16-color graphics when it ran on a computer capable only of showing 320x200 4-color CGA graphics. Now this idea was brought along to the 320x200 16-color EGA-supporting SCI, allowing game artists to mix all 16 colors with each other in patterns to create even better looking graphics. The SCI system also introduced mouse support, enabling the user to direct the main character on screen by moving the mouse cursor to the desired location and clicking it. The old-style keyboard support was naturally also supported, as well as joystick control. An improved menuing system enhanced the look and feel of a game, and whenever the user pressed a character key, a command window automatically popped up, freezing the game until the user had finished the command, unlike the AGI system that always displayed a command prompt at the bottom of the screen and never froze up the game when you typed in a cmmand. So now the user could write commands without hurry even when the character on screen was in immediate danger, a very convenient feature. The SCI system also showed the current score and the name of the game at the top of the screen at all times.

All of this was very nice, but even more interesting was the things that the players didn't see: The SCI system improved scripting technology in a dramatic way, by supporting object-oriented scripting code. In a style similar to C++ or JAVA programming, game programmers could now write script classes for basic handling of things like moving creatures in the game and then re-use that code, adding/modifying only the parts separating different creatures. Sierra On-Line was way ahead of its time with this interpreter!

The Roland MT-32 Sound ModuleBut the most revolutionary thing about SCI was that it introduced support for extended sound hardware on the PC. Other popular computer platforms such as the Atari and the Amiga already had good sound, but the PC still only had the dreaded single-voice PC Speaker that wasn't really intended for music at all, although bravely used by Sierra On-Line and other computer game developers nonetheless. When the first proffesional sound devices compatible with the PC hardware, such as the AdLib and the Roland MT-32, were introduced, very few people believed in them. But Ken Williams foresaw what others had not realized: This technology would become big one day! He worked hard to make sure that the company would promote these cards and make people buy them.
All in all, over $400,000 was spent on developing the technical improvements in SCI.

In September of 1988, the first SCI game was released: King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. It was a really impressive game, taking full use of the superior SCI system. For the first time ever, people with the right hardware could hear real soundcard music in a game on their PC:s. It was a stunning experience that, combined with Sierra's agressive marketing efforts made people rush out to buy PC sound hardware, thus launching the soundcard boom that has made it a standard component in today's PC:s

In October 1988, the company took a major step by going public, thus becoming Sierra On-Line Inc. Allowing public shareholders to buy Sierra stock gave the company working capital to develop new products and technologies.

Part 3 - Growth and Acquisitions (1989-1993)
The SCI system was truly ahead of its time and became the base for almost every single adventure game produced by Sierra On-Line after 1988. It was used for development of both Police Quest II and Leisure Suit Larry II, and in early 1989 for Space Quest III.
Roberta took another pause from the King’s Quest series in 1989 to write Colonel’s Bequest: A Laura Bow Mystery, a game taking place in the 20’s and with a story not completely unlike the one of Mystery House.
The Colonel's Bequest: A Laura Bow Mystery boxart
In 1989, yet another successful Sierra On-Line game series was born with the release of Quest for Glory I: So You Want to be a Hero, written by Lori Ann Cole. This was not entirely an adventure game, as roleplaying elements was seamlessly woven into it as well. It was thus the first Adventure/RPG hybrid ever made. The game was originally called Hero’s Quest, but this resulted in copyright problems as people could confuse it with the well known Milton Bradley board game, so Sierra On-Line had to change the name.
Al Lowe also made the third episode of the Leisure Suit Larry series in 1989, a game that ended up in the back lot of Sierra On-Line itself!

The last game to be made in the AGI system was Manhunter 2: San Fransico in 1989 After that, Sierra solely used the superior SCI system for all their adventure games. The Manhunter series didn't become successful enough for more sequels to get done.

In the same year, Sierra’s sister-company Infocom, who only made old-style text adventure games but had improved them to near perfection, was shut down. People didn't buy enough text adventures anymore, as Sierra On-Line and others created more and more impressive-looking graphical adventure games. The golden era of text adventure gaming was over, but the success story of Sierra On-Line was far from over...
Ken Williams
In celebration of their ten years in the business, it was decided that Sierra On-Line should make new, enhanced versions of the first games in their five most popular game franchaises: King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest and Quest for Glory, using the new SCI system. As Roberta Williams had begun work on the next King's Quest game, newly hired game designer Josh Mandel was assigned to the project of remaking the first King's Quest game. Roberta kept an eye on the project, but Josh still had pretty free hands in designing the game.

In 1990, Sierra revolutionized the adventure game genre again with King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder. It was written in SCI version 1 (the previous version being called SCI 0) and had beautifully hand-painted background scenes, scanned in 256-colors. It looked absolutely stunning compared to the average computer game of the day. It also scrapped the old text parser interface for a totally icon-based system where you could interact with the game solely using the mouse. Some old text-parser fans complained that this new system greatly reduced the challenge and fun in playing an adventure game, but at the same time it made adventure games more appealing to new players and the new system prevailed. King's Quest V was the first Sierra On-Line game ever to sell more than 500,000 copies. It won several awards as well, such as the Best Adventure Game of the Year from both the Software Publishers Association and Computer Gaming World Magazine.

Roberta's 1990 SPA awardsA new version of Mixed-Up Mother Goose was also released this year. After two years in development, it was released on CD-ROM and had digitized speech instead of text. It was the first true multimedia adventure game to be released on CD-ROM. Developing was not an easy process. The speed of CD-ROM drives at the time made it impossible to find speech data on the disk without a noticeable delay whenever a character in the game was going to say something. Synchronizing the lips of the characters to the sound was also impossible. Of course, few people had CD-ROM players at the time, but the ones who did got to experience something truly amazing. It won the Software Publishers Association's 1990 Best Early Education Award. Ken Williams was in fact one of the nominees for the Lifetime Achievement Award at the same ceremony, but he lost it to Steve Wozniak, the legendary co-founder of Apple Computer. "I can't imagine a better guy to lose to than Steve. He's always been one of my major inspirations in this business." said Ken. (Quote from Sierra News Magazine.)

The releases of the SCI versions of Sierra's old classics in 1990-91 unfortunately proved a sales disaster. It turned out that old Sierra fans liked the originals much better, despite their outdated graphics and sound, and new players were not very impressed with the gameplay.

A CD-ROM version of King's Quest V was also made in 1991. The voice acting was mostly made by sierra employees. It was the second Sierra game to be released on a CD.

Dynamix logoIn 1990, the still growing Sierra On-Line made their first big acquisition of another computer game company: Dynamix, founded by Jeff Tunnell and Damon Slye in 1984. A number of heralded adventure games, like Rise of the Dragon, Heart of China and Adventures of Willy Beamish were released by the company in the following years. But they also designed successful games in other genres, such as the award-winning flight simulator Red Baron, the Front Page Sports series and the innovative puzzle game The Incredible Machine, just to mention a few.

INN screenshotA very interesting project was started at Sierra in early 1991: Ken Williams, always eager to explore new technologies, decided to look at the possibilities of a new way to play adventure games: In multiplayer over a global network! He assigned Al Lowe, Jeff Stephenson (who did much of the programming on the AGI and SCI systems) and Matthew George to the project. Matthew would work on the low-level modem communication system, Jeff would write a multiplayer version of SCI and Al would program the high-level applications. He started to think up Leisure Suit Larry 4 as a multiplayer adventure game. There were many problems to solve if this was going to work. They installed 32 new telephone lines in the building, bought a bunch of 2400 baud modems and connected them all together. The system proved difficult to implement, so Al wrote a simple checkers game to test its basic features. It worked, and he went on making a backgammon and then a chess game just to kill time while Jeff and Matt continued working on the system. Eventually, they realized that it was not going to be possible to make the multiplayer adventure game they had planned. They couldn't even figure out how the game should really work. But the simple games they already had were fun enough to play to make it a real product. Al's wife, Margaret, came up with a name for it: Constant Companion. It was later renamed The Sierra Network, or TSN for short. For a monthly fee, everyone with a modem could connect to it and play simple games against each other, send email and things like that. It was very cool and very ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the number of people who owned a modem and the technological limits (it was even estimated that in order to make it a profitable affair, they needed 50,000 users, and in order to service that number of users they needed about 20 people working only on installing new modems!) made it very unprofitable. Eventually, when it was losing 10 million dollars a year, half of it was sold out to AT&T for 50 million dollars. Later on, AT&T bought the rest of it for another 50 million dollars and renamed it The ImagiNation Network, or INN. About a year later, still losing a lot of money, it was sold to America On-Line for 10 million dollars. After a short time, AOL unfortunately decided that it wasn't going to be profitable enough, so they shut it down.
The TSN/INN network is barely remembered today. It was simply too ahead of its time. Today, Internet gaming is a huge thing and it's growing like mad. Only now can it be realized to full extent how great this network really was. The only real problem about it was that it was invented too early! After failing with the multiplayer adventure idea, Al decided to never make a Leisure Suit Larry 4, and that's part of the reason why he named the next game in the series Leisure Suit Larry 5.

A screenshot from Eco Quest: The Search for Cetus1991 also saw the release of Eco Quest: The Search for Cetus, a very sucessful adventure game for kids. Taking place mostly underwater, the game blended facts with fiction in a successful and original edutainment adventure, encouraging kids to become aware of ecological issues and environmental hazards. Shipped together with the game was also a book entitled I helped save the earth: 55 fun ways kids can make a difference and a part of the proceeds from the sale of each copy of the game was donated to The Marine Mammal Center in California. The game was also sold with the stamp Games to Get Young Minds Moving on it. The other games in the series were Mixed-Up Mother Goose CD, Lori Ann Cole's Mixed-Up Fairy Tales, Corey Cole's Castle of Dr. Brain and Jones in the Fast Lane.

In 1992, Sierra On-Line bought Bright Star Technologies, a multimedia technology company famous for their Lip-synching technology. This technology was used in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, the biggest project Sierra had ever undertaken. The game was co-designed by Jane Jensen and featured proffesional voice acting, motion-captured animation, a multi-threaded storyline and an impressive 3D-animated introduction sequence.

Right after finishing King's Quest VI, Jane Jensen started production on the first game in her own series. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was produced as a CD game right from the beginning, with an all-star voice acting cast, including Hollywood actors Tim Curry, Mark Hamill, Leah Remini and Michael Dorn. With its brilliant storytelling, featuring a neo-gothic horror story about voodoo and a family curse, set in modern New Orleans, the game received much critical acclaim and won several awards. The success helped launching Jane's career as a novelist and she soon wrote a paperback novelization of the game.


Jane Jensen, creator of Gabriel Knight Tim Curry, voice of Gabriel Knight, in the recording studio
In 1993, Sierra bought Coktel Vision, a Paris-based software developer that provided the company with games such as the Inca and Goblins series, and was a valuable asset in international development and distribution.


Coktel Vision logo
Sierra's Oakhurst facilitiesSierra had grown enormously since its first years and put Oakhurst, California on the map. The Oakhurst facility constantly grew and new buildings were needed to hold recording studios, warehouses and other things needed to continue making games of the highest quality using the latest technology. The company had grown to become the single biggest employer in town. With over 500 miles to the closest university, finding people to hire was becoming a major problem. Without an airport available nearby, Ken Williams found most of his time being spent travelling between Oakhurst and different business meetings at other places. Microsoft founder Bill Gates had previously asked Ken how he could run such a successfull business from such a remote place, and it was now apparent that it wasn't possible to keep doing that and still grow. It was time to move the headquarters.
The decision was made to move north, to Bellevue, Washington. The Seattle area was much better suited to run the company from and with companies such as Microsoft based nearby, finding people to hire wasn't a problem. With management and some of development moved to Seattle, the company could continue growing and still keep developing games in Oakhurst. The company was now made out of four separate development and marketing divisions: Sierra Publishing, Dynamix, Bright Star Technologies and Coktel Vision, each one working separately on development of new products but sharing manufacturing, distribution and sales resources.

Part 4 - A New Era (1994-1998)
With the move of the Sierra headquarters to Bellevue, the company was again free to grow and prosper. In 1994, the improvements in PC technology had reached the point where multimedia applications on CD-ROM with digital sound and music were becoming the standard, and rumors of Windows 95, the operating system that would change the whole interactive entertainment industry, were starting to spread. In order to keep at the bleeding edge of technology, new kinds of games were necessary. The development cost of computer games was quickly growing with all the extra work it took to make better and better graphics and sound. Celebrating 15 years in the business, Sierra re-released all of their most popular game franchises in special anniversary collections with all the games up to that time on CD-ROM. They also changed the design of their logo to a slightly different look this year.
Third Sierra On-Line logo
After finishing King's Quest VI, Roberta Williams embarked on not only one, but two new projects, and they were the most ambitious ones ever. On one hand, she created King s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, together with co-designer Lorelei Shannon. On the other hand she developed the horror-adventure Phantasmagoria. The games were extremely different from each other, and they both used new techniques.
King's Quest VII was made in a new version of the SCI interpreter, called SCI 32. Programmed in a 32-bit environment it was more multimedia- and Windows-friendly than the previous versions of the interpreter. The graphics of the game was presented in double the resolution of King's Quest VI and used cel animation, just like a traditional animated movie. It took four animation houses to complete the graphics for the game and it was released directly on CD-ROM. The game was very light-hearted and Disney-like in its design, making it a fun game for children to play.

Phantasmagoria boxartPhantasmagoria on the other hand featured live actors captured in Full Motion Video, or FMV for short. This was a new and popular technique in the mid-90's when "interactive movies" was a buzz-word in the industry. By blending captures of actors and props in front of blue screens with 3D-rendered backgrounds, an epic horror-adventure set in a spooky old mansion was created. The project was much bigger than anything Sierra had previously undertaken. The development cost of this game reached the levels of Hollywood movies. A brand new video studio, featuring a 16x16 meter blue screen, the latest in digital recording equipment and the best Silicon Graphics computers available at the time, was built for the game and over 20 professional actors were hired. The game script was about 400 pages long, four times the size of a regular movie script, and an additional 100 pages of storyboards set the style for the over 800 scenes in the game. The game required four months of filming alone and over 200 persons were involved in the production, not counting the Gregorian choir of 135 persons that was used for parts of the music in the game. This project had been in Roberta's mind for several years and was something dramatically different from the family-friendly King's Quest series. This was a gruesome horror story in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King and would be very unsuitable for children. The huge amount of violence and gore in the game together with a few daring sex scenes caught a lot of attention from the computer press, and the fact that it was shipped on 7 full CDs, making it by far the biggest computer game ever produced, made it even more famous. At the time of its release in late 1995 the anticipation of the game was extremely high. However, the game turned out to be a big disappointment to a lot of people, and computer game reviewers complained about bad acting, boring video sequences and a gameplay that was much too easy and linear. But this could not hurt the sensational sales of the game. Almost a million copies were sold when the game was first released, making it the best-selling Sierra adventure game ever.

More successful in getting FMV and a good gameplay working together was Jane Jensen, with the release of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within in 1995. The game, shipped on 6 CDs, took place in Bavaria, Germany and featured two parallel stories; one where Gabriel Knight, the hero from Jane's previous game, as a Shattenjäger has to solve the mystery of a series of suspected werewolf killings. The other one featured his assistant Grace Nakimura, as she went on a historical journey and solved the mystery of Mad King Ludwig II and the legend of a lost Wagner opera. With a superb mix of fiction and historical facts and tons of photographic material shot on location in Germany, the game provided an irresistible atmosphere that awarded it the 1996 Game of the Year award by Computer Gaming World.

Grace Nakimura, one of the two main characters in Gabriel Knight 2
Meanwhile, the Police Quest series left the adventure genre with the fifth installment in the series. Police Quest: SWAT, designed by Daryl F. Gates, former Chief of Police at the Los Angeles Police Department, (Jim Walls left the series after making the third Police Quest game) was a simulator of tactical police procedures during crisis situations when the elite forces has to be called in. The action/strategy/simulation gameplay mix was a success and would spawn more sequels, although the Police Quest name was dropped from all subsequent titles.
The move to Bellevue brought great financial success to the company, and in 1995 focus was turned to new areas of home entertainment. A number of investments were made in 1995 in the home productivity area. In May, Sierra acquired the rights to use Print Artist, a desktop publishing program enabling the user to print high-quality documents at home. Green Thumb Software, a company creating gardening and landscape products, were also acquired by Sierra as well as Arion Software, producer of the MasterCook culinary series, acquired in September. A joint venture with P.F. Collier to jointly develop and publish a multimedia general reference encyclopedia was also made in November the same year.

But investments were also made in the gaming area. Sierra On-Line purchased the strategy games publisher Impressions Software, creators of games like the Caesar series and Lords of the Realm. Papyrus Design Group, designers of acclaimed racing simulations such as the NASCAR and IndyCar Racing series, and flight simulation software developer SubLogic, designers of Pro Pilot, were also purchased by Sierra On-Line in 1995.

1995 was a great financial year for the company. With $83.4 million in sales from its software-publishing business, earnings were improved by 19 percent, bringing a net income of $11.9 million to the company. This cause the stock price to jump from the 1994 value of $18 to $26.

Sierra is sold
CUC logoIn July 1996, CUC International, a huge membership-based consumer services conglomerate with travel, shopping, auto, dining, home improvement and financial services offered to more than 60 million customers worldwide, aggressively sought to expand into interactive entertainment and offered to buy Sierra at a roughly 90% higher price than it was trading. With such an offer, the decision was in the hands of the shareholders and not the management, and the company was sold to CUC. Other interactive entertainment companies to be acquired by CUC were Blizzard Entertainment, Davidson & Associates, Gryphon Software and Knowledge Adventure. The transfer of control to CUC was a matter of much discussion as they had no previous experience in the interactive entertainment business. At the time though, Sierra thought that by consolidation with their new sister-companies they would be able to grow even faster than before. Ken Williams decided that this was the right time to leave his post as chairman of Sierra On-Line and go on with other projects. Initially, control of the company was transferred to three persons: Scott Lynch, Randy Dersham and Bill Moore. Ken Williams stayed with the company for another year to help the company settle in its new organization before he left it for good. Signing a non-competitive clause with Sierra, he would be unable to create or join another computer game company.
April 1997 saw two additional acquisitions: Berkeley Systems, publisher of the best-selling You Don't Know Jack series and the After Dark Screen Saver series and Books That Work, another home productivity software company creating software for design, 3D visualization and creation of home-related projects such as gardens, kitchens etc.

The sports area was also expanded in 1997 by the acquisition of Headgate, a developer of golf products.

Things unfortunately took a turn for the worse when CUC decided to transfer the control of the company to Davidson and shut down a number of groups within Sierra. But that was just the beginning.

On April 3, 1997, Sierra announced that the staff of the old company headquarters in Oakhurst would be reduced by almost 50%, relocating about 90 people to Torrance.

Cendant logoIn May of 1997, CUC decided to merge with HFS Incorporated, a leading franchiser of brand name hotels, residential real estate and car operations. In December the same year the merger was completed and they jointly formed the Cendant Corporation with more than 40.000 employees and operations in over 100 countries. While still remaining one of the most important interactive entertainment companies in the world, Sierra now had to get used to being only a part of Cendant Software, one of the divisions within Cendant. The company also changed character into more of a publisher than a developer of games. This was just one example of a trend in the business, where most of the big computer game companies of old went in the same direction.

After leaving the post as Sierra chairman, Ken Williams soon embarked on a new project. In November 1997, together with former Sierra Executive Vice President of Product Development Jerry Bowerman, he founded WorldStream Communications, an Internet-based company developing online communications software.

WorldStream Communications logo
In December 1997, Sierra acquired PyroTechnix, another game developer.
In 1998, Sierra split up its organization into five sub-brands:

Sierra Attractions, responsible for the casual gaming area, with titles such as the Hoyle, You Don't Know Jack and 3-D Ultra series.
Sierra Home, the home improvement software publisher responsible for the Print Artist, Hallmark Card Studios, MasterCook series etc.
Sierra Sports, publisher of sports entertainment software, such as the Papyrus racing games and the Front Page Sports games.
Sierra Studios, the developer and publisher of the big games, with home offices in Bellevue and development groups at Impressions Software and PyroTechnix. It would also be the publisher of independent developers.
Dynamix, a Sierra Company was simply the old Dynamix, developing games like the 3D combat simulation Starsiege and the Red Baron and Pro Pilot flight simulators.
A new company logotype, for the first time without the Half Dome silhouette in it, was used for the company and all of its sub-brands.
Fourth Sierra On-Line logo

Sierra Attractions logoSierra Home logoSierra Sports logoSierra Studios logoDynamix, a Sierra Company logo

In May 1998, Sierra Publishing, the Sierra division still working at the original company headquarters in Oakhurst, changed its name to Yosemite Entertainment. While now only one of many parts within Sierra, this core group of well over 100 employees were in most cases the very same people that had been responsible for Sierra's huge success throughout the 80's and early 90's. Sierra FX, a sixth sub-brand, was formed for this development studio to release their games under.

Yosemite Entertainment logo
Sierra FX logo
In June 12, 1998, Sierra announced the appointment of David Grenewetzki as their new president. Grenewetzki had a solid experience in computer software company management from previous appointments at many companies, including Palladium Interactive Inc. and Accolade Inc. and promised to work hard to make sure that the company would be able to meet the future challenges of new platforms, product categories and technologies.
In March of 1998, Cendant had reported a 1997 net income of $55.4 million in March of 1998. However, the real 1997 result was a net loss of $217.2 million. As irregularities in the books of Cendant were discovered in early 1998, an audit committee set up by Cendant's Board of Directors launched an investigation and discovered that the former management team of CUC, including its top executives Walter Forbes and Kirk Shelton, had been fraudulently preparing false business statements for several years so the company could meet the earning expectations of Wall Street analysts. It was made clear that HFS had not played any part in this fraud scandal. The irregularities were in the area of several hundred million dollars and when the news was announced and the real numbers revealed in the end of September, the Cendant stock instantly plummeted to about one fourth of its former value. As a result, the company was sued by its shareholders and the former CUC management team was terminated. In March 2001, Forbes and Shelton were indicted by a federal grand jury and sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, accused of directing the massive accounting fraud that ultimately cost the company and investors billions of dollars. Sierra and Davidson were among the many Cendant subsidiaries that had been used in the irregular bookings and Cendant had already announced its intention to sell off its entire computer entertainment division when the news of the accounting fraud came. Sierra was one of many companies that suffered great losses because of this affair even though it had been totally out of their hands. The following years would be filled with aggressive endeavors to restore the profitability of the company.

On June 3, 1998, WorldStream Communications announced the launch of TalkSpot, an online radio station featuring well-known talk show hosts and a wide range of quality programs on three live channels. One covered daily news and current events, one was for general issues affecting people's lives and one was for sports only. Offered as a free consumer service, TalkSpot radio could do much more than traditional radio by offering live chat, streaming pictures and many other things to the listeners on its website.

During the last few years, traditional adventure games had gone from one of the main genres to a relatively unprofitable business. Production costs were high and the sales couldn't match the ones of First Person Shooters and the increasingly popular RPGs. This caused fewer and fewer adventure games to be produced by Sierra. In 1998, Yosemite Entertainment released Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire as the conclusion of the series, not planning any more sequels. The game was originally intended to feature an Internet multiplayer feature, but time limitations forced the game to be released without it. Sierra promised that a multiplayer edition of the game was to be released later.

After finishing Phantasmagoria, Roberta Williams, together with Mark Seibert, had worked on the next installment in the King's Quest series. The rising popularity of 3D graphics and action games resulted in a game design dramatically different than anything seen before in a King's Quest game. Taking place in a true 3D environment, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity featured action and RPG elements mixed with traditional adventure puzzles. The game took four years to complete, much longer than any previous game in the series, and was aimed at the average gamer rather than the die-hard adventure fan. Although many old fans of the series were disappointed by this approach, the strategy proved successful and the sales of the game were great when released for Christmas 1998. However, the success of the game still couldn't change the common opinion that adventure games was a dead genre and the new game design didn't revolutionize the genre as Roberta was hoping it would do.

Gordon Freeman, the main character in Half-Life
If King's Quest: Mask of Eternity didn't revolutionize its genre, a game that did was Half-Life, created by independent software house Valve and published by Sierra. Half-Life was a new kind of First Person Shooter, where a totally continuous gameplay featuring scripted plot sequences in a 3D environment of previously unseen quality told the story of an accident in a top-secret government research facility resulting in hordes of both aliens and government soldiers turned against you, as you would try to escape from the facility and put an end to the killing of your fellow employees. The game not only received great reviews and over 50 Game of the Year awards, but also had sensational sales and spawned a huge community of online players and modifiers of the game engine.
In November 20, 1998, Cendant announced the sale of its entire consumer software division to Paris-based Havas S.A., France's largest media company. Havas, in turn, was a newly acquired business unit of Vivendi S.A., a huge water utility conglomerate with more than 220.000 employees, expanding into the media and telecommunications business. With this sale, Sierra became a part of Havas Interactive, the interactive entertainment division of the company.

Havas Interactive logo

Part 5 - A Change of Direction (1999-)
After the Cendant scandal, the purchase by Havas S.A. (a division of Vivendi S.A.) was seen as a lucky turn for the company. The sale was completed in January 12, 1999. In addition to the $800 million paid by Havas, Cendant received a $185 million bonus in cash payments for showing good 1998 results. The acquisition was Vivendi's first major media purchase in the U.S. Initially, the sale didn't result in any major changes at Sierra, but they were soon about to come...
Black Monday
The many acquisitions made by Sierra over the last few years had resulted in an organization that was very hard to run for the management team. With development studios spread out all over the country and overseas, Sierra officials decided it was time to tighten their belts. Therefore, on February 22, 1999, they publicly announced a major reorganization of the company, resulting in the shutdown of several of their development studios, cutbacks on others and the relocation of key projects and employees from these studios to Bellevue. This decision was made by Sierra's own management, not by Havas. Studios that were shut down included PyroTechnix, Books That Work Inc. and Synergistic. Headgate was sold back to its original owner and the publishing of Sierra's InterAction magazine was discontinued.
But the shutdown that definitely received the most attention was that of Yosemite Entertainment. With the exception of the warehouse and distribution department, the entire studio was shut down. This decision was unexpected and highly controversial, as this was the original Sierra headquarters and the birthplace of all the classic games that had made it such a successful company. Many of the people behind these games still worked there and were now informed that they had lost their jobs. In total, about 135 people were fired in Oakhurst. Yosemite Entertainment was in the middle of developing the highly awaited space combat simulator Babylon 5, the Lord of the Rings-based online multiplayer roleplaying game Middle Earth, the tactical simulation game Navy SEALs and a multiplayer add-on to Quest for Glory V.

A disturbing aspect of this shutdown was the way the employees were notified of the shutdown. Going to work thinking it would just be a normal Monday, they were soon called to a meeting where they were informed that they had been sacked, and this was only about 15 minutes before the news were officially announced to the press, a cause of action totally against common practice and that upset many people. 40 people, critical to the development of Babylon 5 and Middle Earth (the other projects were dropped) were offered to relocate to the company headquarters in Bellevue and continue with the development, but with the feelings towards the company at the time, few of them accepted right away. Eventually though, about 30 people moved from Oakhurst to Seattle. Needless to say, the shutdown of Yosemite Entertainment was a major blow to the small mountain community, and emergency actions were taken to help all the people finding new jobs. Former Sierra employee William Shockley created a discussion forum for former Sierra employees at www.roboto.com and Ken Williams sent them all a letter, telling them how sad he and Roberta felt for them and what had come of the company they founded.

Abandoned desks Lost jobs Cleaning out the offices
But the bad news didn't even end there. At the same time, legendary game designers Al Lowe and Scott Murphy were fired. Al had just started work on Leisure Suit Larry 8, planned to feature 3D-animated characters. Scott Murphy was involved in a Space Quest 7 project that originally looked very promising, but that had later started facing serious problems when Sierra's management wanted it to be a multiplayer adventure game, a design that had been unsuccessfully attempted before with Leisure Suit Larry 4 and was doomed to fail this time as well. This was a result of the common opinion that adventure games were a dead and unprofitable genre at the time, and by firing two of the most well-known game designers in the industry, Sierra made it perfectly clear that they weren't interested in any more Leisure Suit Larry or Space Quest adventure games, at least not as long as they were less profitable than other genres.
Roger Wilco in Space Quest 7, the game that never wasThree-dimensional Larry Laffer didn't make it into a new game either
The closing of Yosemite Entertainment and all the other changes at Sierra left a lot of people upset and angry at their new management and business strategy. The date February 22, 1999 soon became known as Black Monday (or Chainsaw Monday as Scott Murphy named it) and the sad events gathered a huge Internet community of Sierra fans from all over the world, sharing their feelings and thoughts about the reorganization with each other.
Layoffs continued in March 1, when Sierra fired 30 persons at the previously unaffected Dynamix, This was 15% of their entire workforce.

On March 6, Ken Williams, together with his wife Roberta and game designers Al Lowe and Scott Murphy appeared on Ken's online radio station TalkSpot in a nearly two hour live show called The Sierra Reunion, a real treat for all Sierra fans. During the show they shared their thoughts about the past, present and future of Sierra. A lot of people called in to the show, including a significant number of famous old-time Sierra employees.

In June 1999, Ken Williams shut down TalkSpot and laid off its employees. He did this because venture capitalist Rich Shapero of Crosspoint Venture Partners had convinced him that shutting down TalkSpot and instead focusing on providing the technology behind it to other companies would be a more profitable affair. Early in December the same year, WorldStream unveiled its new technology, designed to broadcast things such as teleconferences, concerts, product presentations and sales events. They offered a program called eComm1, a national network of servers and a mobile Plug-and-Play broadcast setup called Studio In A Box to the customers.

Sierra continued to publish games for smaller development houses with great success. In September 1999, they released Homeworld, a real-time space combat strategy game in full 3D, developed by Relic Entertainment. The game design was revolutionary for the genre and the game received great critical acclaim and many awards.

Homeworld boxart
A happy, and still sad moment for adventure game fans was the release of Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, in November 3, 1999. Happy, because this was a long-awaited game that was embraced by both fans of the series and game critics and reviewers. Sad, because Sierra also announced that this was going to be their last adventure game for now. With their new business strategy, it would probably have been canceled too, if it had not been in production for such a long while and if not so much money had been spent on the development already. The only thing that would make Sierra return to making adventure games would be a change in popularity for the genre.
Gabriel Knight 3 screenshot
Fortunately, things changed for the better in Oakhurst when UK-based games developer and publisher Codemasters, in an effort to establish themselves in the United States, announced that they would launch a new development studio in Oakhurst, using the old Sierra facilities and many of the old Yosemite Entertainment staff in mid-September 1999. In early October they announced that they would take over management and maintenance of the online RPG The Realm and that they would pick up and complete the previously canceled Navy SEALs. They also reported that they had obtained the rights to continue using the name Yosemite Entertainment for the development house.
Codemasters logo

Meanwhile, Sierra announced another reorganization, this time into three business units: Core Games, led by Mark Hood and Jim Veevaert, Casual Entertainment, led by Steve Van Horn and Barbara Schwabe, and Home Productivity, led by Dianna Amorde and Anne Boswell. Basically, Core Games replaced Sierra Studios and Sierra Sports, Casual Entertainment took over the Sierra Attractions unit and Home Productivity replaced the old Sierra Home. This reorganization resulted in even more layoffs, eliminating 105 additional jobs and a number of games in production, including Desert Fighter and Pro Pilot Paradise from Dynamix, Babylon 5, the much awaited game started at Yosemite Entertainment and Orcs: Revenge, a Berkeley Systems title. This was announced on September 21.

Ironically, this reorganization caused all of the former Oakhurst employees who had opted to relocate to Seattle and continued working for Sierra to be laid off, when both the Babylon 5 and Middle Earth projects were shut down. Fortunately for these people, they had negotiated for good severance packages in case this would happen.

On June 2, 2000, Sierra released Ground Control, an action-packed 3D RTS combat game developed by Swedish-based Massive Entertainment. The game was another hit for Sierra as a publisher and received great reviews and many rewards.

Ground Control logo

Vivendi Universal Publishing logoAt the end of June 2000, a strategic business alliance between Vivendi, Seagram and Canal+ was announced and Vivendi Universal, a leading global media and communications company, was formed. Havas S.A. was renamed Vivendi Universal Publishing and became the publishing division of the new group, divided into five groups: games, education, literature, health and information. The games division included Sierra On-Line, as well as Blizzard Entertainment and Universal Interactive Studios.
Meanwhile, Impressions Games released a series of successful games in their City Building Series, published by Sierra. With games like Caesar III, Pharaoh and Zeus: Master of Olympus, players could recreate the magnificent towns of great ancient civilizations.

Caesar III boxart Pharaoh boxart Zeus: Master of Olympus boxart
On May 9, 2001, Sierra On-Line announced the appointment of Thomas K. Hernquist as their new President and CEO. Michael A. Ryder also joined Sierra as COO and and Senior Vice President of Product Development. Hernquist did not stay for long at Sierra though, and Ryder soon took over as the company CEO.
In early August the same year, WorldStream Communications was one of the many victims of the dotcom crash, and the company was forced to shut down and laid off its 87 employees.

On Aug 14, Sierra On-Line let the ax fall on Dynamix for the final time and closed the development studio for good. Dynamix was viewed by many Sierra fans as the very last remaining piece of the company with a meaningful connection to its legendary past, and with the end of their 17-year history in the business, Sierra On-Line was considered to have taken the final step away from its roots. Dynamix developed a lot of memorable titles for Sierra, but was frequently in financing troubles. In the more aggressive business climate Sierra had entered after the CUC fraud, there was simply no place for unprofitable development studios anymore.

In mid-November, Sierra On-Line changed the design of their logo for the fifth time. To the delight of many old fans it featured the old Half Dome picture, even though the company really had no connection to Yosemite anymore. Still, fans of the old Sierra organization saw this as a sign that there might still be a chance, however small, that they would eventually return to their roots.

Fifth Sierra On-Line logo
On February 19, 2002, Sierra On-Line officially announced the change of their name to Sierra Entertainment, Inc. They claimed the new name would "reflect the company's commitment to developing a broad range of entertainment products, including games for both the PC and next-generation consoles." (Quote from official press release.)
And with that, the history of Sierra has reached the present!

Sierra Entertainment continues to develop and publish successful interactive entertainment products and is one of the biggest players in the industry. What the future holds for the company is unsure, but expansion in the console area is likely, and their big titles will probably continue to be those produced by smaller independent development houses. Hopefully, Sierra will also embrace its glorious past by bringing the adventure genre back in new appealing forms and maybe even return with more King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Gabriel Knight games. A few recent news seems to point in that direction...

The End - For now...